World Travel Market is one of those events that I look
forward to with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. The former feeling
because I am never sure whether or not my feet will stand the pace of wandering
around the Excel Centre for 2 days, and whether my memory is still good enough
to allow me to put a name to every familiar face I see there. Excitement
because it is one of the foremost opportunities every year for my colleagues
and I at Leeds Met and at ICRT to spread the word about Responsible Tourism.
This year’s RT awards were as powerful as ever in terms of
raising awareness of the great stuff that is being done around the world to
help communities benefit more from tourism, and to help tourism businesses work
more smartly in terms of delivering the highest standards of customer
experience without trivialising the cultures their guests are visiting, or
damaging irrecoverably the landscapes they are passing through. So all thanks
to Professor Harold Goodwin, Justin Francis and the WTMRTD team for their hard
work promoting, judging and presenting the awards.
But for me, the real work gets done in the breakout sessions
that we offer, exploring different themes associated with Responsible Tourism.
This is the fourth year that I have had the privilege of chairing one of the
sessions. Last year we looked at managing visitors in World Heritage Sites, and
this year we explored the concept of visitor payback initiatives – how to move
beyond levying an admission charge but instead raising funds from tourists and
tourism businesses and investing these resources in initiatives that really
benefit the host destination and the resident community.
My three speakers were excellent and sadly, we ran out of
time for a longer debate on some of the challenging issues they raised. But I
know I’ll be thinking about what they all said and introducing key points into
forthcoming lectures so that my students – undergraduate and postgrad – begin
to appreciate what we as an industry can do to progress still further the
spirit and the aims of the Cape Town Declaration.
Kath Bateman from Caledonia – a specialist language and
dance tour operator based in Edinburgh and operating mainly in Cuba – spoke
passionately about all the little things she does in terms of putting together
packages that are true partnerships with the host community. Employing, for instance, one dance tutor for
every holidaymaker rather than one for the whole group. Limiting group sizes to
15 so that the impact on the host community is not overwhelming and so that the
internal group dynamics don’t fragment too much. Utilising homestays rather
than government-run hotels, so that the additional income goes straight into
the pockets of the community. All small steps but when taken together, having a
real benefit in the destination.
Hetty Byrne from the Forest of Bowland AONB spoke about a
range of initiatives they are engaged in to promote a more sustainable and
responsible approach to tourism in this hidden corner of Lancashire.
Partnership again was a word that came up, both in terms of publc:private
sector relationships but also between local tourism SMEs. She talked about two
businesses who promoted an attractive walking route between the two locations,
so that guests staying in one place could spend a day rambling through the AONB
before ending up in a guest house offering a similar standard of experience. It
might not deliver a major increase in business to either partner, but even if
it stimulates a handful of extra bednights each season, that is income that
otherwise would not have been earned. Incrementalism was another theme of
Hetty’s talk – she mentioned a local inn that asked for a voluntary 20p
donation on every bill, with the money to go towards improving access to the
countryside for people with mobility problems. Some eighteen months later,
thousands of pounds had been raised to purchase an electric buggy suitable for
people with impaired mobility and to treat some of the routes around the inn so
that they were fully accessible. Twenty pence on a bill of £20 or £30 is marginal
to the customer, but added up those individual 20 pences have made a major difference in
the destination.
The final speaker, Ruth Kirk from Nurture Lakeland, picked
up on the theme of visitor giving and talked about some of the strategies for
extracting funds from tourists. Voluntary donations are an obvious one, but she
also mentioned how other businesses are also acting as conduits for funds that
are collected and used to provide match-funding for major conservation projects
such as footpath repair initiatives. One of the cruise operators running
ferries on Ullswater asks for a small donation as part of the ticket income and
some accommodation providers do the same. In the 18 years that the Lake
District has had some form of visitor payback initiative, more than £2 million
has been raised to invest in conservation projects.
In the short but spirited Q&A session at the end,
perhaps the most challenging question was one that forced to address once again
an issue we hadn’t really answered during the presentations. The title of the
session had asked “Do tourists pay enough for accessing our heritage”? An
audience member from Australia posed the simple question “Do they”. We had
talked about strategies used by the public, private and voluntary sector to try
to increase tourist contributions, but was it ‘enough’. The most
straightforward and honest response came from Kath who said that tourists can
never pay ‘enough’, because there is always something that needs to be done.
Whether in Cuba, where she operates and where living standards remain lower
than one would like, or in the North West of England where there is a legacy of
erosion on the hillsides to treat as well as a major programme of investment
needed to avoid future damage.
So rather than asking are tourists paying enough, perhaps we
should be asking, “are enough tourists paying?”
In other words, should we be rolling out these initiatives that we know
work for some people and extending their reach so that everyone is involved.
Rather than a voluntary donation on top of your room charge, that could mean a
bed tax. Rather than an optional top-up on your bar or restaurant bill, that
could involve a local sales tax with revenues ring-fenced for re-investment in
projects that benefit the host community.
But this would almost certainly require legislation at a time when
government is seeking to remove as much red tape as possible because it is seen
to stifle growth. So whilst some of us understand the importance of understanding and responding to
the polluter pays principle, both from an industry and consumer side, I’m not
sure that the rest of the world is ready to play ball. Yet.
And in terms of my memory. Apologies to Rosie, for
forgetting where I know you from (now I remember – a night out on the
Senegambia strip and some very good whisky and cigars).
